NC v. David Prevatte

David Wesley Prevatte stood trial in Pender County Superior Court in Burgaw, North Carolina, charged with first-degree murder and related charges in the November 2017 death of his five-year-old niece. By his own public account he was in the house that morning. He says he found her unresponsive, performed CPR, and that he and his father took her to the hospital. She died three days later. In a 2018 jailhouse interview he said, again and again, that he had nothing to do with it. He is presumed innocent, and the State alone carries the burden of proving otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Pender County Sheriff's Office named him a suspect in June 2018, when he was nineteen. He was not charged in her death until February 2022, more than four years after she died, and the State has never said publicly what changed in between. That same summer of 2018, her mother, his own sister, said publicly that there was no way her brother did this and that the detective had it out for him. That is the gap this trial lives inside: whether the evidence places him in that room, or whether investigators fixed on a nineteen-year-old early and never let go.

Jury selection began on September 28, and the trial ran ten court days. On October 15, after the case had gone to the jury, the court declared a mistrial on the defense's motion: it found that information about him from outside the evidence had been passed around the jury room, and that a fair verdict was no longer possible. There is no verdict. The State may try him again, and the case is back in court on November 13. We were never here to convict David Prevatte or to acquit him. We watched whether the State could close a gap it has carried since 2018, and the twelve people asked to answer that question never got to. Start with the background report below, then go through the whole trial with us.